The Albuquerque Turkey: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

over at Allie. She continued rubbing Boy’s head while silently shaking her own.
    The problem with living with a world-class grifter is that she almost always knows what you’re thinking.
    “Well, good luck with that, Vic. I’m sure you’ll be the next Paul Klee.”
    “Who?”
    Say this about a Mirplo, they never let ignorance stand in their way.
    After a while, Vic departed to make the rounds of bars and boîtes where, according to his dim understanding of the Santa Fe art community’s status system, one could advance one’s reputation merely by showing up—or getting kicked out.
    “There’s a poetry slam at Stalacti,” he said. “Maybe I’ll crash.”
    “Now you write poetry, too?”
    “What can I tell you?” he said. “I’m a Renaissance dude.”
    The thought of Vic writing poetry sent a shudder through my linguistic orthodoxy, but I clapped him on the back as I sent him on his way. “Knock ’em dead, kid.”
    “He shoots, he scores!” bellowed Uncle Joe in reply.
    That night, Allie and I made love—slow, sweet, and tender, just the way normal people do when their time is their own and their conscience troubles them not. Later she said, “I’m proud of us.”
    “For what?” I asked.
    “Doing this the right way. Trying, at least. I know it’s hard.”
    I basked in her approval but lay awake long after she fell asleep. Being in the public eye troubled me. Too many people now knew my name, and though I had nothing (currently) to hide, it made me feel unsafe, like a squirrel who’d strayed too far from the trees. Boy lay curled up at the foot of the bed. He farted in his sleep, and I found the expanding bubble of noisome fume oddly comforting.
I’ve got a woman and a dog
, I thought.
A place to live. Fifteen minutes of fame
.
How bad can things be?
But the last thought I had before drifting off was Vic’s observation about good deeds—“We know those don’t go unpunished.”
    The next day, incredibly, I actually applied for a job. Okay, not a
job
job, not like a greeter at Walmart or something. What I did, I went over to the community college and offered my services as a career counselor. I figured, who better to counsel careers than one who’s had so many? * But I couldn’t talk my way past the lack of a college degree without flat-out lying, which the current terms of embargo forbade. The human-resources director told me she found me quite qualified. And charming, which struck me as good news, for it meant that I still had my old Hoverlander mojo. Absent that sheepskin, though, her hands were tied. It made me wonder whether the first step in my remedial reconstruction wouldn’t have to be education in earnest. I flashed on myself sitting in the back of a civics or an English class, parsing the three branches of government, or a sentence. Somehow, I couldn’t make that dog hunt.
    Bootstrap education, then? Find a job that requires nothing more than initiative and will—what your granddaddy used to call gumption—and build a career from the ground up? I thought I had what it took to be a self-made man. God knows I’d self-made myself often enough. But again I could forehear the dismal subaudial drone of days. Where’d be the fun in doing over and over again what I’d long since mastered? That seemed a death sentence of sorts.
    I went and chased these cheery thoughts through a plate of steak and eggs at a Rudi’s Eatateria, lately franchised and spreading like an algae bloom from its Los Angeles roots because even, or perhaps especially, in these troubled times, people take great comfort in a terrificplate of steak and eggs. It’s my habit to sit by windows when I eat, partly to people-watch, but mostly just out of good con hygiene. You never know when knowing what’s coming in the front door will buy you a half-step head start out the back. This Rudi’s had a southern exposure, and sunlight washed through tinted windows, splashing a silvery yellow glow across the retro Formica